What other games have they worked on? 7 and a half years is still far too long for a major studio to go without releasing a single new game or even having anything to show for themselves as to what they're working on. They consistently released new games every 2-3 years from 2002 to 2014, then nothing at all for more than twice that interval. Something has obviously one very wrong behind the scenes, beyond just a single canceled project.

See Sakurai of Smash fame, who apparently works himself to a point he needs fluids, but is so clear that it is his own choice that not even The Jimqusition calls Nintendo out for Crunch. 

This is good that Nintendo stepped in to prevent this. Crunch overall is just not a good thing for the industry. It's not only that is it completely wrong to strip away the lives and sanity of employees in your company, but crunch, in general, does not lead to better games. One former employee of Nintendo Giles Goddard used to say under Yamauchi Nintendo employees would constantly work overtime and crunch since Yamauchi believed that this lead to better games releasing at a faster rate. However, once Iwata took over he put an end to crunching as he knew as a game programmer/developer that constant crunching does not lead to better games or a much more productive company ecosystem overall.

I think the proof of this alone is comparing the quality of Nintendo games to those of American publishers such as EA & Activision. Despite EA and other American publishers constantly crunching, the quality of their games doesn't come close to Nintendo games despite Nintendo employees only working an average of 7 hours a weekday, which is EVEN fewer hours than the typical 8-hour workdays you'd see. Also, Nintendo still manages to have a good & steady flow of software that's clearly still more than satisfactory enough for the consumer since 100 Million+ are still willing to purchase the Switch thanks in part to the steady & good stream of quality Nintendo games.

I'm not saying that crunching can't lead to good games or speed up the process of things, as Metroid Prime is proof that you could make a great game within 9 months of crunching. However, typically the results show that it isn't even worth doing any sort of crunch.

The real story here is Retro studios is still open.

I once worked two and a half months of 100 hour+ weeks and only one day off the whole time… fucking falling asleep at my desk, coming home and drinking a half a liter of whisky every night just so I could get to sleep on time to get some sleep. My sanity never fully recovered.

Pimping ain’t easy :(

I meant to comment earlier after Mnemeth, but I just wanted to say that you don't have to be a software developer or programmer to know that crunch is NEVER a good thing. It does not matter what you do for a living. You could be waiting tables, picking up trash or working in a call center from home.

I'm a desktop support technician. I've always been at the high end of health, and the only time I've ever missed time at work due to sickness in the past 10 years was when we were being crunched  to open up a brand new building about five years ago. After a week of 10-12 hour days, I suddenly got the worst fever I had in years and couldn't even hold my head up straight for days. My direct supervisor was blown away because like I said, I had never had a sick day up until that point. Her boss, the equivalent of a vice-CEO, took me for a lazy asshole who just wanted time off.

During those months of crunch, everyone in the IT and Maintenance departments started to absolutely hate each other, lol. Seeing your coworkers more than your family, wondering if you should even bother to go home when you know you'd have to come right back in a couple of hours, wanting to punch the shit out of wishy-washy project manners who suddenly decide they want to go in a different direction on something that undoes several hours/days of work....

This is why I'm all for game delays and developers being allowed to take as much time as they need. It's honestly a miracle that any major project, like a game, movie, television production, news cast, building or anything involving dozens/hundreds of people ever gets completed when you think about it. So many moving parts and pieces. So many thousands of things that could have gone wrong, and did go wrong. So many things that died on the cutting room floor or were swept under the rug. So many cut corners.

There are mountains of research that shows that human productivity and concentration falls off a cliff after about five straight hours of work.

I'd also point to a publisher like Ubisoft, that has thousands of employees across many worldwide studios, yet many of their games feel so "production line". When you're constantly being pressured to work nonstop on the same project for years with few breaks, you're not thinking of fresh and creative new ideas, you're trying to find ways to cut corners and get things over with so you can just go home and maybe be able to chill for once.

They changed the culture to much that they are now to lazy to make games lol. As the saying goes, give someone an inch and they'll take a mile

hm, pressure does lead to good results sometimes, but if applied for a long period it certanly does not as it removes the motivaton factor and a tired mind is more robotic than creative

defnitely a positive change for any gaming studio, I'm sure a kind of pressure to deliver is always there regardless of tight deadlines

The Gamecube era was when we really see games for Nintendo being subject to serious crunch. Super Smash Bros. Melee is the most notorious with Sakurai working himself almost to death. Rogue Leader was also developed in a really short time to make it for the system's launch.

There are people who work better under pressure, and there are people who don't. Subjecting employees to that sort of crunch is bad, but people who do it on their own because of their dedication to their craft like Sakurai should be commended - though maybe they should also be encouraged to take better care of themselves.

What Retro is doing has been a mystery. They helped a lot with Mario Kart 7, but there's been no word on them helping with any other games since then. My 2 theories are that the move from the Wii U to the Switch may have affected them more than other studios and the game may not have been as suitable for the newer hardware, or they were working on a franchise that Nintendo lost faith in and so cancelled. There was a rumor that they were working on a Star Fox spinoff, but after the failure of Star Fox Zero they may have cancelled everything to do with that franchise.